This was my second attempt at the project, and I wanted to develop the same concept into the scene, with a small bridge leading over a gap in the floor. This time however, I created the models and applied the textures in Maya and Substance Painter, and rendered out the sequence in Arnold. I also recreated the rotoscope in Nuke and correctly removed the light in the left side of the plate using RotoPaint and Roto nodes. Starting from this point was also proving much more beneficial, as I was aware of the mistakes I had made previously, and I did not want to repeat them.
First Attempt at Composition
For this project, we were tasked with implementing objects into a short sequence realistically, that is to correctly follow the camera movement and perspective according to the track. FIrstly, I began creating a 3D scene to attempt a recreation of the garage. As we had covered 3D lighting in Nuke a short while ago, I found this area very interesting and quite powerful. To implement this scene, I created several planes and extruded them in Nukes 3D viewer, and created 3 different lights. Two lights in the first area of the garage, and one glowing red light into the machine room. These were all set to vary in intensity to capture the lights into the 3D scene.
I also added the mouse created in my collaborative project, and animated it to a basic degree so that it winds and turns to look at the camera as it approaches. I wanted to also have the mouse jump over the bricks into the machine room, however this did not quite turn out as I had hoped. Instead of jumping over a 3D wall asset, I instead faked the disappearance of the mouse with a Multiply node keyed to make the mouse disappear as it jumps upward towards the broken wall.
Shortly after creating a basic shape of the 3D walls however, I started to have serious issues with the way the geometry followed the perspective of the plate, and creating geometry to follow the shape of the broken wall was turning out to be extremely difficult as the sequence played on. as well as Nukes modelling toolset to be a bit less usable when compared to specific 3D software. All of this was generally an attempt to capture 3D lighting, but this was not proving accurate as the track played through. The largest issue however, was the strange results I was getting when the camera moved closer to the broken wall, as the lighting would bounce off seemingly thin air due to the perspective change.
Another major hurdle I encountered was texturing, as moving from 3D modelling and texturing software I made the mistake of thinking the same process could be done in Nuke. As I was having some success exporting geometry from Maya to Nuke in Alembic format, I experimented at first with exporting the geometry with correct UV tiles, and tried to texture using the ‘stmap’ node and exported texture maps. This was largely unsuccessful, as the textures stayed in the same position whilst the camera moved, creating a dizzying effect and not at all what I had envisioned. In an attempt to fix this issue, I tried to transform the textures according to the camera movement, but this again was proving not to be a solution. The final alternative was to use flat colour swatches without any texture to alleviate the dizzying effect. This is not how I wanted the final models to look however, hence why I began again with fully textured sequences.
I enquired with several of my classmates as to the issues I was experiencing, who tried to help me as much as they could, but through my process I soon realized that I had approached this project from almost completely the wrong angle. As my specialty has ultimately been working in 3D, understanding composition when working with 2D plates is another aspect which I have to consider more carefully, and furthermore realize that the rules which apply to 3D software do not necessarily translate into developing compositions. The reality was becoming clear, to begin the project again, recreate the rotoscope and eliminate the 3D scene. Also, to replace the objects and textures with sequences taken from Maya with already textured and lit assets. As well as this, I wanted to develop a much more cohesive script, which does not create a large amount of issues as created by my first attempt.
Despite all of these problems I encountered during my first attempt, I still feel that I learned a great deal about working with Nuke, and surely what not to do when developing a balanced and understandable scene.